BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF DAVID COX.*
A RAPIDLY rising demand for David Cox's landscapes, and the speedy prospect of some more being offered for sale, combine to render this an opportune time for the publication of his memoirs, and as near an approach as can be made to a complete catalogue of his drawings and paintings. Mr. Solly has endeavoured to supply both these wants in the book before us, and has collected for the purpose a large amount of acceptable information.
The personal history of the great and delightful painter of English rural landscape presents but few striking features ; but his life and art are so closely interwoven, and the one so reflects the other in its well-regulated and truthful course, that the narrative of his career cannot fail to be an agreeable subject of contemplation. He was born in 1783, the son of a superior kind of blacksmith, at Birmingham, whence have come several other landscape painters of good repute. A schoolboy gift of a box of paints, when his leg was broken, set him copying prints ; and not being strong enough to wield hammer and tongs, he went on fingering his pencil, and was bound apprentice in the toy trade, after some preliminary training at a drawing school. A photograph here given of a miniature painted by him on a locket shows a considerable proficiency thus acquired, at sixteen. But his term of apprenticeship being abruptly closed by his master's suicide, be got an engagement at the theatre; ground colours for the scene-painters, and watched at his work their chief, De Maria, who seems to have been an artist of taste. By a lucky chance he was able to make use of his practice in locket- painting, and coming to the manager's rescue with a volunteered portrait of the leading actress, in a piece whereof the plot turned on the production of a likeness of the heroine, he got a regular engagement, and for two or three years painted
for the stage and travelled with the players. But he did not much like the actors' way of life, and baying set his heart on becoming a landscape painter, he gave up this en- gagement and came to London in 1804, where his mother found him lodgings at Lambeth, at the house of a widow, whose daughter he married four years afterwards, when he removed with his wife to a cottage on Dulwich Common. Times were hard with him at this period, but he had managed to support himself and his wife and child by selling landscapes for small
* Memoir of the Life of David Cox. By N. Neal Sony. London : Chapman and Hall.
prices to the dealers, and giving lessons in drawing and perspec- tive. Up to the time of his marriage he was also doing a little business in scene-painting. While residing at Lambeth he re- ceived a few lessons from John Varley, whose drawings, with those of Glover and Havel, be had seen and admired in PaLser's shop, in the Westminster Road, where he offered his own for sale. When the Society of Painters in Water-colours was formed in 1805, Cox joined a rival association, which, however, became bankrupt, and some of his drawings were seized among others for payment of the rent of the gallery. But in 1813 he, at the age of thirty, became a member of the Water-Colour Society. In the following year he went to reside at Hereford, tempted thither more by his desire for a country life and its proximity to the scenery of the Wye, and North Wales, than by an engagement, which he accepted and duly performed for five years, to teach, not only landscape drawing, but heads and hands and flower painting, and "bronzing on white wood in Chinese fashion," at an academy for young ladies. Water-colour drawings brought small prices in those days, and it was necessary to combine the professions of artist and drawing master. But industrious sketch- ings by the river Lugg, which vias at hand, and occasional visits- to other parts of England and Wales, and one tour in Belgium and Holland in 1826, enabled him to send a prodigious number of drawings to the exhibition nearly every year. To furnish these he. would come to town for a month or two, and then sketch on the Thames, and give lessons to old pupils. By 1824 he had put by- money enough to build a house at Hereford, but three years after- wards he sold it and came to London, both on his son's account,. who was growing up, and in order to have more intercourse with artists and lovers of art. It was during the period of bia employment as a drawing master that be recorded in print. some of the principles and practice of his art, in two publications. illustrated by soft-ground etchings and aquatints from his hand., For the next fourteen years he resided at Kennington, continu- ing his London teaching, sometimes sending to the annual exhibition between thirty and forty drawings—many of which were, however, still returned unsold—and paying his yearly sketching visits, generally now to Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire, and lingering more and more over the Ulverstone sands and Bolton Abbey, but most at his dearly beloved Haddon._ In 1829 he crossed the Channel once more, and sketched on the coast near Boulogne and Dieppe, and even went to Paris. But. the interior of France failed to interest him, and he never cared. again to leave his native shore. He had long passed through what. are generally called the best years of life, when he was moved to make another change. In 1841, he, at the age of fifty-eight,. returned to the neighbourhood of his native town, and established. himself at the village of Harborne. His son was now married and settled as an artist, and the old man had again a longing. for the country. But his chief object was to devote the energy which he still felt to the cultivation of oil-painting. 'With this view he had, two years before, taken some lessons from Muller, whose skill as a sketcher had qualities in marked unison with Cox's own method of expression in water-colour. During. his own life-time, the power which David Cox had acquired in oil-painting was little known or appreciated, but within the last year pictures that he painted in 1847 have been sold at Christie's for nearly forty times the price he received for them. It was. after the death of his wife, in 1845, that be became known as a. sort of patriarch to the landscape painters of our day, by his annual visits to Bettws-y-Coad. His repeated sojourns there at the Royal Oak, his kindness and free advice to young artists, and the veneration with which they regarded him, will long be among the traditions of the place, and they form the subject of a separate chapter in this book. He died in 1859, four years after he had been taken to Scotland to have a subscription portrait painted of him by Watson Gordon. Such is a brief outline of his life ; but the book must be referred to for anecdotes and traits of his gentle, genial character, his generosity and goodness, and his simple, unaffected love of nature and his own branch of art.
Mr. Solly divides David Cox's style of water-colour drawing into four periods. The first, between 1804, when he first came to London, and 1814, when be went to Hereford, shows the' influence on his composition of the works of Girtin, Barrett, and. Varley, but his colour was then "wanting in variety, and some- times in freshness. It is flat, low-toned, and often rather dull and dark," particularly in his trees. The second period, to 1829„ embraces his residence at Hereford, when be became " more care- ful, but less conventional. The colouring is brighter, and the finish, although not more elaborate, is more telling," and "the art is better concealed." The third period, which may be said to extend from about 1830 to 1850, comprises without doubt most of Cox's representative drawings. In these there is a visible increase of breadth, more vigour and rapidity in the handling, more insight and penetration into the deeper meaning and mystery of nature, more movement, more sparkle and brilliancy, and a more mature knowledge of effect, and of the forms and treatment of sky and clouds. There is also a more decided character in the figures introduced." In the drawings of the last period, from 1850 to 1859, the time of his old age, "there is the deepest Byrn- .pathy with nature, and greater power than in any others, being even more the work of the artist's mind than of his hand."
David Cox had laid a good foundation in the practical lessons of effect and bold treatment which he learnt in his early practice of scene-painting. He adopted the sound principles of landscape which his teacher Varley and his contemporaries in English water- colour art had already laid down and adhered to, and which he himself embodied in his published treatises. He had, moreover, his own way of turning to account the works of other masters. There is an interesting photograpb here given of a composition of l'oussin's, which he applied when a young man to a sketch of his own of Kenilworth Castle, and there are in existence drawings painted by him in recollection of known works by Turner and other artists. But the source of his greatness was that of all other great painters, his original and loving and unceasing study of nature. Yet this observation of nature, intense and true as it was, was kept within certain limits by his own special proclivities. There is a great deal which properly belongs to the most perfect landscape-painting that is not to be found in the works of David Cox. They are so intense and expressive, so thoroughly purified from anything out of harmony with the sentiments they express, so complete in pictorial effect, and so prodigiously varied within the range of motives by which they are inspired, that we are apt to forget that this range is circumscribed, and that there are whole departments of landscape art of the most noble artistic aim outside its limits. We need only point to the infinity of expression and distinction of the character of every kind of place and scenery in the works of Turner, to show how limited
was the field of action of David Cox. He himself was wont to observe in something like a tone of regret that he "could not finish." No doubt what he generally wished to express re- quired no "finish," and the expression might often have been weakened by further detail. To have painted the leaves on the trees and the blades of grass would have destroyed the blinding sensation of high wind in the grand _drawing of the skirts of a forest, in his late manner, of which a photograph is here given ; but in such drawings as the " Bolton Abbey" we cannot but feel that there is room for an infinity of beauty in the detail which exists in nature, and which, if introduced by an equally great artist of another kind, would enrich the picture without injury to its quality of light or its breadth of composition. But it was not the substance and infinity of the earth's surface that David Cox cared to depict. The English rural life that had his deepest sympathy, and the fresh country air that he most loved to breathe, were the great incentives of his painting. The figures that he introduces are not there merely as points of light or dark, or to enliven the scene, or, as in good topographic work, like Turner's, to tell the ways of the place that he depicts. They are part and parcel of the scene itself, and often the main motive of the picture. His effects of atmosphere are not merely intro- duced to conceal one object and enlarge another, or to make them fade one by one into the dim perspective. What he seeks to represent is the active air itself, drawing the big clouds and scat- tering the hay about the field. As he felt more strongly his mission in art, and passed from one stage of its development to another, so did his pictures seem to partake less and less of the character of topography. He painted the scene rather than the spot. As he grew old he contracted within narrower limits the field of his study, but sought to give deeper expression to what was independent of time and place.
As the motives of David Cox's art were thus limited, however complete their expression, so did he reject some of the processes paintiug which have been found valuable by artists of different, but equally legitimate aims. The use of a full wet brush on nnabsorbent paper, particularly the rough Scotch wrapping-paper, that he discovered in 1836, was specially adapted to the atmo- spheric effects he wished to produce, and to the rapidity which enabled him to seize them in his sketches from nature. He never sought to conceal his method of work, and he advocated this practice on account of the power and purity which it gave to the shadows. It seems in a great measure due to a desire for still more power than he could obtain by this process, that he was induced to turn his attention so late in life to oil painting.
The book contains a list of Cox's exhibited drawings, and the prices at recent sales, together with some reprints of critical notices; but the absence of an index renders the mass of valuable information which it contains almost inaccessible to students and collectors. The arrangement of the chapters is not the best that could have been adopted, and -the narrative would be improved by curtailment. We observe, too, several marks of carelessness or undue haste, which may throw needless doubt on its authority.
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